Collaboration and Multimedia Authoring on Mobile Devices

This paper introduces adaptation-aware editing and progressive update propagation, two novel mechanisms that enable authoring multimedia content and collaborative work on mobile devices. Adaptation-aware editing enables editing content that was adapted to reduce download time to the mobile device. Progressive update propagation reduces the time for propagating content generated at the mobile device by transmitting either a fraction of the modifications or transcoded versions thereof.

With application-aware editing and progressive update propagation, an object present at a mobile device is characterized not only by a particular version, as in conventional replication, but also by a particular fidelity. We demonstrate that replication models can be extended to account for fidelity independently of the mechanisms used for concurrency control and consistency maintenance. As a result, the two techniques described in this paper can easily be added to any replication protocol, whether optimistic or pessimistic.

We report on our experience implementing adaptation-aware editing and progressive update propagation. Experiments with two multimedia applications, an email reader and a presentation software package, show that both mechanisms can be added with modest programming effort and achieve substantial reductions in upload and download latencies.